You Can’t Fix Me, But Please Stand By Me

We share what a second run through the STAIR program revealed about PTSD, emotion regulation, and the quiet signs of progress. A poem, a song, and a freezer‑door trick anchor simple tools you can use when the threat system takes over.

• outpatient stay at St John of God and why it helps 
• STAIR explained as skills for emotion, communication, and boundaries 
• feeling again after numbness and noticing growth 
• drive, soothe, threat systems and why soothe shrinks in PTSD 
• SUDS check‑ins, naming emotions, and body mapping 
• practicing skills in the green zone to use in red 
• fast arousal drops with cold, space, and grounding 
• upcoming courses on sleep and trauma recovery 
• pickleball, Persian food, and a lesson in humility 
• season plan, holiday pause, and self‑kindness over comparison

You can find me on Facebook and Instagram, and don’t forget to like and follow

Song of the Week:

Andra Day - Rise Up

https://youtu.be/lwgr_IMeEgA

Thought of the Week:

"There will be a lot of posts soon from people sharing how much they achieved in 2025. But, in case someone needs to hear this.... It's okay if the only thing you did this year was just get through it"

Transcript

Welcome And Why I Missed Last Week

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey there, welcome to Mad Mail's Mike. Thanks for joining me. My name is Melissa and this is a podcast all about me. About my life. About my life with PTSD. About my life with the husband and kids and friends and everything in between. Thanks for tuning in. Hey everybody and welcome to episode 33. Sorry that I didn't record last week. I there was not enough foresight with that. I hadn't planned the podcast before I went away. Normally when I head down to the hospital, I have my laptop and my mic, but I had the laptop for The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, but I didn't have the laptop to record. So let's get this episode started and we will have a chat about what I've been up to. So welcome again to episode 33. As I mentioned on my socials, I've actually spent a Tuesday to the following Wednesday down at St. John of God, North Richmond, for an outpatient programme, which was called the STER program. And that's an acronym, but I'll have a chat about that further on in the episode. I just want to sort of highlight some interesting things that I learnt, and hopefully you can put those into your daily lives and maybe see a little bit of progress as well. But it was it's always nice being back at the hospital. Yes, I stayed at the hospital, but we stay in a sp certain part of the hospital where it's just almost like a hotel room with shared buttonsuite. Now have our own room and everything like that. No nurses, we're in control of our own meds. And the important thing is, well not necessarily important thing, but important to me, is that you have the ability to drive. So car keys aren't taken off you, so you could sort of come and go as you please, which was quite nice. But it's always nice catching up with my mates down there and a couple of my old friends I took out for lunches and dinners and got a many and a petty, and yeah, it was it's always nice to see them. But one of my mates who I met down in hospital um sent me this poem yesterday. I think it was yesterday. Yes, it was yesterday, and I just wanted to read it out to you, and I think I don't know, it was very flattering and heartwarming for me to be sat in this. So it's called The Friend Who Just Stands by, and it's written by B. Y. Williams. And it goes, When trouble comes, your soul to try, you you love the friend who just stands by. Perhaps there's nothing he can do. The thing is strictly up to you. For there are troubles all your own, and paths the souls must tread alone. Times when love cannot smooth the road, nor friendship lift the heavy load. But just to know you have a friend who will stand by until the end, whose sympathy through all endures, whose warm hand clasp is always yours. It helps some way to pull you through, although there's nothing he can do. And so with feverent heart you cry, God bless the friend who just stands by. So it's a beautiful song, and yes, it's very flattering, and I love her for sending that to me. I think it's important to know that this mental health journey that we're on is not something that somebody else can fix for us. And that poem said that like this is a journey that you are doing your by yourself, and that you're the only person that can fix you. But I'll stand by you as we walk through this road together, and just knowing that you have somebody in your corner, somebody walking side by side with you while you're going through this journey is so important because yes, it's something that we have to do by ourselves, but it's nice to know and feel the love and support of other people around you. And look, I was sometimes some weeks I really, really struggle as to the song of the week, and sometimes it happens really, really easy. But I sent this song to the same friend a couple of nights ago, maybe, maybe a week ago, maybe not even that. I can't remember when I sent it to her. But it is sorry, I've just had a mad mind blank. It is Rise Up by Android Day. So let's have a listen to that now. I think it's there's moments in my journey of dealing with my PTSD and mental health that I haven't wanted to rise up. But we need to rise up, whether it's for the next minute, for the next hour, for the next day. And I know I continually say that, but things will get a little bit easier. And if you can just do that one thing at that one time, whether it's get out of bed or send a mate a message saying that they're thinking of them. If you're the loved one of somebody going through that, make sure you're reaching out and just little messages like thinking of you can mean the world to the person you're sending it to. So I think it's very important that we rise up every day and we rise like a wave because this life is worth fighting for, and this journey that we're on is worth the fight, and I can see where I'm up to on my recovery path that this fight has certainly been worth it. And I feel myself not coming out the other end, but certainly taking note of that post-traumatic growth, and I think it's very important to realize that. And everybody's in a different on a different journey, and everybody's journey looks very, very different. And your journey might be over in a couple of months, or your journey might not be over for decades, but it's hard. And I know I've said it before a million times, but this is a temporary speed bump, and I know it hurts like hell, but you can get through this. Now I just wanted to have a chat about um the program I did down at the hospital, and it's called the stair program, and there's stair one and stair two. And I did stair two, I did the first stair one in November last year, and I thought it would be different, but when I first got there, I learned that stair two is identical to stair one, and I'm going like, what the hell? Like, I've already done this before, but what we sort of well, what I certainly don't think of often is that PTSD affects our brain, and it is an injury, and it affects our memory. So they use STER two to go a little bit deeper into the same content, but because so I'm sitting there going, Yes, I know all of this, but I don't use any of this. And so hopefully now that I'm a diff I'm in a different part of my journey, I may be able to take more of it on board and use it in my daily lives, these skills. So STER stands for skills training in effective and interpersonal regulation. So essentially it was about emotion regulation, it was about communication, it was about boundaries and things like that. So it was very, very good. So the first subject that we did was understanding and responding to emotions. And looking back in hindsight, the first time I did this, I didn't have any emotions. I was very heavily medicated and I was just numb. I at the time I didn't realize that that's where I was sitting in my emotion wheel. But in hindsight and retrospectively, I can look back and go, I wasn't feeling a thing. Like I wasn't having to deal with my emotions or anything like that. But now that I'm off my antidepressants, I am certainly feeling the wave of emotions. And I think it's imperative now more than ever that I am very aware of my emotions because I can feel them and be very aware of how I deal with my emotions as well. So there's I think an important thing to sort of say here is that there's three cycle, three circles of emotional regulation. So you have the drive, and this is every person, like with or without mental health issues. This so there's the drive system, the soothing system, and the threat system. So these three emotional regulation all work and coincide together. So what a person without PTSD, generally those three systems are all basically the same size. But when it comes to PTSD, the threat system of our emotion is so much larger than the others, and particularly the Sue's, it's so minuscule that we don't have any way of coping with those emotions that we're doing. So it was nice to get a visual representation of these emotion regulations, and we had to actually draw it up on the whiteboard as where ours fits. And I know that if I was to do this 12-18 months ago, my wheels would certainly look very different to what they are now. So seeing that visual smacky in the face, it was like, oh, I am actually making some progress, and it was very, very nice. And what I found very helpful every day is that when we first started the group, we would say we were sitting on our suds, as we always do, but also name an emotion that we were feeling. And in our manual that we got, there was a feeling wheel, and it just sort of instead of just saying tired, sad, angry, it went deeper in this sort of photo about what other emotions we could be feeling and having to actually dive in and look and feel at what we are actually feeling. And then and then we discussed where we're feeling it. So if you're sitting here there listening to this, I would encourage you to pick an emotion and ask yourself, say, for example, if I'm feeling anxious, where am I feeling it? So for me, I feel it in my chest. I feel when it's particularly bad, I feel like there's an elephant sitting on my chest, and I just can't get the breaths in. So whether you're sad, like where are you feeling that, if you're a little bit nervous or apprehensive, are you feeling that in your belly? And try and break down where you're feeling that emotion and what you can do to try and move forward with that. So, because with those with PTSD, our soothe emotion regulation is so so small. It's important that we actively take measures when we're feeling relatively well. So have a gauge of where your subs are sitting on the subjective unit of distress scale. And if you're fortunate enough to get into the green, practice those skills like paced breathing or progressive muscle relaxation or just grounding. Go sit outside with no shoes on on the grass and see what you can hear. Listen to what you can hear, or take note of what you can hear and what you can see and what you can feel, and do these uh coping strategies and these soothing strategies whilst you're in a position where you can actively focus on that. So then once you get into the amber or even into the red zones, you've already been practicing these skills while you're at a relatively functioning level that they almost become second nature when you're sitting at those higher levels. So, and we know that once your suds are too high, whether they get up into the eights and nines and particularly the tens, these soothing things aren't going to help us. So we have to look at different ways that we can move forward. So, whether that's remove yourself from the situation or get an ice pack and put it on your forehead and over your eyes, because that is an amazing way to bring your suds down. And if you're shopping and you're in woolies and you can feel your suds going out, go put your head in the freezer. There's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, people might think you're a dickhead, but it's probably better to think that you're a dickhead when you're putting your head in a freezer opposed to being a dickhead when you lash out at the checkout chicks. So start looking at different skills that you can use every day, and that might just be a couple of minutes of grounding. Just it doesn't have to be anything huge, but just make an effort to get those things going. So the course was really good. I really enjoyed it. I'd recommend it for people, and despite my aversion at the beginning that stair one is identical to stair two, but it was still very, very informative. And I think and I know that that's intentionally done because of the different stages of the journey and where we're going from there. So there's a couple of other outpatient programs I want to do, which I'll put my name down for having issues with sleep still. Um last night was probably the best night I had oh, in a long time. And it just it's it's hard to function and it's hard to deal with your emotions and things like that when you pardon me, when you're tired, and yeah, so the next one I want to do is PTSD and sleep. It's an eight-week course, but just one a day, so that would mean I'd have to drive down every week, which isn't an issue. And the next one is a four-week residential where you'd stay in the lodge again, which is the trauma recovery program. So it's a lot of group work, it's also one-on-one with a psychologist as well, or somebody from the Allied Health. So they're the two courses that hopefully I can get on to next year, which would be amazing. But while I was down there, and this is this story is going to be a representation of how unworldly I am. Oh, know little about geography. Um, so because my sister lives in Sydney, not particularly close to the hospital, but I thought she'd been playing pickleball as well, so I thought, let's go, we'll go play some pickleball and then we'll go have some dinner. So played some pickleball up at Hornsby, had lots of fun. Emma didn't play because she'd hurt her wrist. So her and another mate from my course were just sledging me the entire time. I've never been so nervous playing pickleball in my life, but it was really, really fun. So after pickleball, we went to a Persian restaurant. And Emma and I had been there a few years ago, and the lady who runs the place is just beautiful. She's just such a lovely, lovely lady, and she has a Persian grocery store next door, and there are these particular lollies, they're sort of like a caramel thing that are beautiful. So I thought, oh well, let's let's go over and get some of these lollies. So we do that, and then we came back and we're sitting there eating this amazing food. Like, I recommend going to a Persian restaurant because it is amazing, nothing but meat and rice. Yum. But I'm sitting there eating my dinner, and I looked at my maid who has also been an inpatient at the hospital a fair few times, and I said, Oh, you know what I'm gonna do? I said, I'm gonna go get some of these lollies for one of the nurses in at hospital. And she goes, Oh, why are you doing that? I said, Well, she's Peruvian, like she'll love it. Like, we're here at this Persian restaurant. And then MR and my mate look at me and go, Are you serious, Myssa? What yeah, what are you talking about? And they've gone, Peru is in South America, and Persia is in the Middle East. So I'm sitting there going, You are an absolute dickhead. But so then we're sitting there having dinner, and I'm getting a lesson about where Persia is or was, because it's now part of Iran. Look, I've actually learned something, but Peru is nowhere near it. And Emma's going, It's on the different side of the equator. Like, this is like, how do you not know this? I'm going, well, clearly Mum and Dad didn't teach us enough geography. So anyway, but I still went and bought her some lollies because I thought it was a cool story, and I knew that she would appreciate the story. But then the next day that she was meant to be working, she was pretty crook, so I didn't get to see her. So now I've got all these extra lollies at home, which I probably will eat, but yeah, it was quite funny. But it was nice to catch up with Emma and her boyfriend and my nephew as well. So that was that was really nice. I've still been playing pickleball. What else was about doing? Oh, I've been playing basketball, played basketball last night. My knee's feeling a little bit funny today, and it was so hot. Like, even for orange, it was hot, and inside that PCYC, it just is like a sauna hotbox. So, yeah. Before we wrap up, I just wanted to give you a bit of an indication of how the rest of this season will go. I plan on doing two more episodes this season before Christmas and then wrap it up for Christmas and New Year, and probably won't drop an episode until maybe February. So spend the time with the kids while they're on school holidays, and we always go away in January. So I just want to, whilst I am feeling good, I want to take the moment to be in the present and spend time with the kids and the husband because they have missed out whilst I've been looking after me, and I know that they understand, but it's still nice to take the time with them. So let's finish on the thought of the week. So one of my other mates from who I met from hospital actually posted this on Facebook and I saw it this morning, and I thought it was actually quite fitting for today's thought of the week, and it is this there will be a lot of posts soon from people sharing how much they achieved in 2025. But in case somebody needs to hear this, it's okay if the only thing you did this year was to get through it. And that's so important. We become so engrossed, well, I know I do, in the social media world. And nobody puts on there that their kids were being an arsehole that day, or that her their partner had a domestic or a fight or something like that. It's always just sunshine and lollipops on social media, and it's very easy to get caught in that trap of comparison and going, well, my life's not like that. So, yes, be kind to yourself because the holidays are a hard season for some of us, and we are all we all put shit on Facebook that isn't necessarily accurate or a good indication of what our lives truly are. So just remember comparison is the thief of all joy. I think that's how that story, that little thing goes. Anyway, have a good week. Thanks for tuning in, and very importantly, be kind to yourself. We'll catch you next week. Thanks for tuning in to Mad Melbourne, I'm glad to spend. And I hope you've enjoyed this video. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram, and don't forget to like and follow. Have a great week, and don't forget to like and sell me.